The common tourist doesn't know how to change it. The common iPhone user doesn't know how to change it. I'd even say the common Android user doesn't know how to change it. All because it _can_ be changed doesn't mean it _will_ be changed.

Even if you don't have a large following on Twitter, for things like this situation, there is almost always a hashtag for the protest in use. For Egypt, it was #jan25, so if you wanted to send a message about Egypt to as many people as possible, you send a message with #jan25 somewhere in it, and people would easily find it, and retweet it to their followers.

Abstractly, in a lot of ways a hashtag on Twitter is like an asynchronous equivalent to an IRC channel, in that you can search for it and get any messages from that tag at any time, and share them with your followers. Hope that helps.

Beyond the fact there's a typo in my original quote, your statement hardly changes my point, and in fact reaffirms it. It makes perfect business sense to cancel services that the market is showing people do not need or want, and that's why said products would be cancelled. Beyond the fact that we're talking about free services, I'd hardly call Knol, Wave or even Gears "basic services".

Given that the Wii U can read the disc, if hacked and given internet access or SD card access, it's not inconceivable that the discs could be dumped as files over a network or to the flash media like was already done on the previous gen consoles.

I'm pretty sure it has very little to do with the patents and more to do with the same reason they used those awkward, little, inverse-reading GameCube discs: fear of homebrew and fear of sharing backups.

But as we know from both the GameCube and the Wii, it's only a matter of time before people work around those limitations.